Influencing the wrong way

Modern day influencing platform is feeding the mindlessness of the mass

Tenth standard wasn’t exactly the time when the search bar in YouTube used to get populated with the likes of “Review of the latest gadget”, but rather, with the subtlety of the young fingers browsing through the vast array of a million videos at a mouse click away, the na?veté of the searches included merely the favourite rock band’s most popular song added to the five minutes preview of the previous day’s Transformers cartoon show. The young brain looking at the white screen with the logo of the play button in the red enclosure could not but marvel at the brilliance of the technology that was just 10 bucks and a 10 minute ride on the cycle away; back in the tenth standard, home was not the place to be having a steady connection to the internet that would seamless stream 480p content on the monitors of our desktops. To our nascent brains in the matrix of the new world, internet was just a place of amazement, and “influencer” was just a word that did exist in the dictionary.

To our nascent brains in the matrix of the new world, internet was just a place of amazement, and “influencer” was just a word that did exist in the dictionary.

The advent of the social network and the multitude of free flowing data gave away the abundance of opportunities at hand. Not only did the prospects of a futuristic job in the field of the mysterious Big-Data, but the ease of choosing one’s own profession over the variance of fields dawned on our plates. When YouTube first started its services over the internet, the bare minimum luxury that was presented to the mass of people accessing, and marvelling, at the red and white logo, as well as the other similar services released then- Orkut, the nascent FaceBook, the idea of Instagram, and the world of personalised online blogs- the plethora of it was absolutely unprecedented, and masterfully so, did the mass accept the wave of new, and the wave of internet as a whole. The internet turned out to be the success of the century, and World Wide Web reigned the charts of everything, so much so, the charts of everything came up on the WWW; the quintessential idea of having a unibody connection between one and all drove the unfathomable quest for unending opportunities and the insatiable thirst for more. What shaped the advent of the new age of technology skewed around the very idea of a singular platform for multi-tenanted architecture of profession– what was once the leisure of the mass became the furnace that spewed money for a livelihood of a person, and that, during the time when the decline in the value of money just started.

The internet started roaring with the availability of information, solution, opportunities and possibilities. It became the one stop shop for a student's project for high school, to the corporate programmers' cheat sheet for the broken code fix– the abundance of the opportunities at hand was the tsunami that moulded the trend of the future then. The numerous websites and the different platforms allowed the mass to be much more socially connected in a virtual world, veiled by the blue of the screen and clicks of the keyboard, or the incessant scrolls on the four by three gorilla glass screen on their palm. The general understanding was clear– people can be reached out to via the pretentious glass veil and the programmed in designs. People, as a whole, will tend to believe and trust the ideas, the words, the beliefs, the propaganda, that would be easy to access, and popular! The queer quantisation of quality simplified its quotient in such a dramatic pattern that the values of persevered technique was pushed to the side and fenced.

This phenomenon was so widespread that the word that was just a dictionary completing word became one of the most challenging professions of the modern day– the trend of being influencers came into being, and rose to fame the culture and days of the fashion influencers, the lifestyle influencers, brand influencers. The impeccable ease with which these budding entrepreneurs scaled their start up with the marked solid platform, and a creative idea in their mind that the new age of business took a sharp turn from the glass panel buildings of corporate world to an amalgamation of reality with its virtual brother. And not only did the marriage turn out to be a completely holistic approach to the modern world, it allowed unforeseen nooks of the worldwide society to be ventured to and made use of– like the setting up of a lemonade stall in the corner of a society where the major sellers did not want to reach out to. They were the tangible parts of the untouchable world where the mass would marvel in the totality of the system, and relish the unchartered ground. Be it a “Review of the newest phone from Brand X” or the “Mountain riding in the trails of the slope of Y”, the whole world wide web had created an alternative, cheap, and repeated consumable!

The caveat, though, of every new upheaval is the imminent saturation in the exponent of growth, and that is the toughest competition that sparks up, and about a decade into the behemoth of this marvellous wave was the time of the bottleneck to constrict the passage of the gushing waters. But, fortunately, the consumers of the products was but the eyes and ears of the mass of people behind their everyday smartphone or their laptops, and the unique selling point of the model was that it allowed a tangible connection to the black box in the head; the only trajectory that was required for the targeted advertisements and the influencing contents to be directed was wide open and for the mass to swallow without hindrance. An excerpt from a Daniel Kahnemann, a renowned psychologist, book on the thinking process of the human brain mentions that the human brain can be tricked to believing anything at a much more ease when it is busy on any other observation, calculation, or simulation. And this very idea is the most profoundly, albeit implicitly, used to win the race of relevance in the meter of popularity. The once populating search bars with na?veté, are now inherently replaced by recommendations based on the probability of the human brain finding the headline or the caption alluring, and the topic mysteriously obnoxious, tarnishing the very existence of an entity; the online world is today run by the idea of having every single content having a “Click-Bait” attached to it.

It is humiliatingly sad how the contents created by the ever so powerful in the era of digital nuclear weapons are very often way past the mark at which it can be called borderline fake and misleading. The mass of people running behind tireless hours of scrolling through a hundred feeds on their respective platform of choice go through such contents, and yet, painfully believing every single word, every single fake accent, every iota of the cotton candy of negligible information that is fed to them in what can be christened Royal. Although, it should be added, it requires a really varied knowledge in the content to find out the very subtle differences between what is sane and what is not– the ease of information in this era has so catastrophically affected the “society” that the generations to come would not be able to ascertain the differences between the real, the ostracised reality, and the created virtualisation of a substitute of a reality. However glistening and alluring be the consumable be, it will eventually end up being a skewed perspective of an influencer who will feed the mass through the loop-holed channel to the belief centre of the brain, and another content on the same premise will display a live inception in the mind of the mass, without the requirement of Leonardo di Caprio venturing in the multiple layers of one’s dreams!

It is funny and intriguing to see these entrepreneurs of the modern day, who are aware of the amount of influence they have mustered up over the decade resort to deviating from the concept of knowledge and feeding on the mass with the green screens, CAPTIONS so RIDICULOUS that they are EFFECTIVE, warped images, twisted sentences, and all of it intertwined in the core of an idea, the idea of a single platform for the mass to reach out to, the idea called internet! It should not be far away where the plight for truth would turn to to a revolution, if only the truth was what was searched for.

If only, and only if…